Every single time, dude, you keep releasing these mega threads with cool ideas. I keep loving going through them. So today we're going to go through as many of your ideas and some of mine that I've already made from home. And we'll see what we can get to.
First one, cynical genius illusion. Cynical people are seen as smarter, but sizable research suggests they actually tend to be dumber. Cynicism is not a sign of intelligence, but a substitute for it. A way to shield oneself from betrayal and disappointment without having to actually think.
Yeah, so this is actually based on a pretty large study, which was conducted in 2018 by Stavrova et Al. And it's basically what I did was they did a series of surveys to test the hypothesis that cynical people are more intelligent. Because a lot of TV, popular culture portrays cynical people as intelligence. So you see characters like Dr.
House played by Hugh Lorry in that show, Sheldon from Big Bang Theory. A lot of these characters tend to be very cynical, very pessimistic, but also geniuses. So it's become a bit of a stereotype. So these researchers decided to test this by actually doing a massive study, which involved about 200,000 people in 30 different countries.
And it was a series of surveys, firstly to test their cynicism and secondly to test their competence, their IQ. And it was interesting because they actually found the opposite of what a lot of people believe, which is that cynical people tend to be lower IQ or at least lower in their performance of cognitive tests. And it's actually very interesting because they sort of positively as an explanation for this. The idea that cynicism is basically an evolutionary heuristic to basically save people from having to think.
It's basically a way to protect yourself against betrayal, to protect yourself against any form of kind of treachery, including treachery of your own expectations. And I can see how this would have probably been a useful heuristic say about 100,000 years ago. In the study they described it as the better, safer than sorry heuristic. So it's this idea that, for instance, if you're out there and you're in a low information environment, so let's go 100,000 years back into the past, right?
So we don't have the internet, we don't have TV, we don't have books, we don't have real knowledge, we're in a low information environment, we're in the middle of a forest. And we see this alien looking fruit on a tree. And we have a choice whether we can eat it or not eat it. And we don't know what this fruit is, we've got no books, we've got no understanding of it, we've never seen it before.
So in that situation, the best thing to do is to default to believing that it's dangerous. Because obviously one fruit, if you eat it and it turns out to be harmless, is not going to benefit you that much. But if you eat that fruit and it turns out to be poisonous, that's the end. So obviously from that point of view, it makes sense to have this kind of pessimistic risk of this sort of approach to life.
Now, the figures is obviously the world now is very, very different from the world that we had. And yet we retain the same basic psychology, the same kind of biology. We are averse to risk and that involves being sort of distrusting of other human beings. Because we don't know these other...
One thing that I'm trying to bifurcate here, what's the difference between cynicism and conservatism or risk aversion or something like that? So cynicism is a kind of pessimism, but it's a pessimism with respect to other people's intentions. So it's believing that people are always doing things for the worst possible reasons. It's usually, you can summarize it saying that people are only in it for themselves.
So basically, you can't trust people basically. So obviously, some conservatism could be a function of cynicism, but I think that, obviously, conservatism is much more broader than that. And it takes into account many other different characteristics. So the thing with cynicism is it's very low cognitive effort.
It doesn't require you to really expend much mental effort to do anything. All you've got to do is not trust something. And to basically just say to yourself, oh, wow, I shouldn't do this because something bad might happen. And our brains are very, very good at finding reasons not to do something.
So there's this idea where if you have a hole in your roof, you could reason to yourself, on a sunny day, you don't need to repair that hole in your roof. So you just not do it. You're like, oh, what's the point? I don't need to do it.
It's sunny outside. It's just laying sunshine into my house. It's actually a good thing. On the other hand, if it's raining, you could also say, oh, well, it's raining.
So I don't want to get wet. So I won't go out. I might slip from the ladder and fall. So your brain is very good at inventing reasons not to do things.
And so we have this natural kind of cynicism. And it actually takes mental effort to overcome that. It actually takes mental effort. In the study, they actually found that people with higher IQs actually tend to be more interesting, which is quite an usual thing.
You would expect it to do the way around. You'd expect high intelligent people to be less trusting, but they're actually more trusting. And this is because they tend to be, they're not necessarily better at determining whether they should trust someone or not, but they're better at determining whether cynicism is warranted or not, which is slightly different. Right.
Why does this sort of a presumption that hoping for the best or that believing in people is naive and smart people would never be naive? One of the worst things that you could do is have the wall pulled over your eyes. It's seen as kind of juvenile or innocent or unsophisticated. And the converse about is cynicism or skepticism is more mature intellectually in some way.
Yeah. I mean, this is sort of like a very popular misconception, I think. And that's why cynicism is very popular because it has the illusion, because obviously if you take no risks in life, then you're not going to fail it ever, because you didn't go out there. You have this idea that I've heard you speak about called the cynicism safety blanket, which I think really sort of jives with this very well because obviously cynicism is a form of protection.
It's sort of like this front that you put up, which protects you from any risk taking. If you don't take any risks, if you don't go out there and if you don't try to succeed anything, then you won't fail anything. So it's basically like a way to guard yourself against any form of failure. And that's why I think people who maybe don't want to expend mental effort or emotional effort, because there's an emotional aspect as well, they will instead just choose not to take the risk.
It's much easier to just say, oh, I'm not going to take the risk because everything's gone. Everybody's out for themselves. I'm not going to trust this person. I'm not going to love this person because they might betray me.
They might not return the affection. I'm not going to go out and try this new thing because I might fail. It's much easier just to not do any of that stuff. And then you can just say to yourself, oh, well, I've never failed.
It's like a kind of ego trip that you put yourself on. But the thing is, the truly sort of intelligent people will say to themselves, well, look, yeah, I might fail. But at the end of the day, it's worth trying because at the end of the day, if you don't try, you'll never achieve anything. You're not actually going to better yourself.
You're just going to remain in the same situation whatsoever. And even failure can be good. If you're intelligent, failure can be good because you learn from failure. In fact, failure is pretty much the only thing we learn from.
It's the only lesson that we learn from. We don't learn when we succeed. We don't learn when we're happy. So, in terms of people who tend to put themselves out there, they will risk engaging in ambitious endeavors because they know that at the end of the day, even if they fail at that endeavor, they're actually still improving their station because they're improving their knowledge, they're learning from it.
So, I think that's ultimately what it comes down to is if you don't have a high IQ, you can feign a high IQ by criticizing other people, they're efforts and saying, oh, look at this wall, he failed. You'll never fail. So, you'll always have that. I've never failed.
But then you've never actually succeeded either. So, I think it's a guard. It's an emotional guard and it's an intellectual guard. Seagull's Law, a man with a watch knows what time it is.
A man with two watches is never sure. Ancient societies follow a single narrative. Modern societies are cacophonies of competing narratives. Without trust, more data doesn't make us more informed but more confused.
Yeah, so if you talk to a lot of these sort of disinformation academics, people who study disinformation and stuff, they'll often say that there's a problem of people not getting enough information. There's this whole idea of low information voters and stuff. That's what people tend to call. Euphemistically call people that they regard as stupid.
It's low information. But the thing is, the problem in society at the moment is not actually a lack of information. It's a lack of trust. That's the bottleneck that is stopping progress.
Because we have more information than we've ever had in whole of human history. I think I read somewhere that sort of every year, more information is produced than in all of the preceding years of human history. That's how much information is exploding. So that's exponential of exponential.
Yeah, yeah. And so information is not the problem. We have more than enough information. The thing that's holding people back is a lack of trust.
And I think it's got particularly bad since sort of the pandemic. Because obviously our mainstream institutions, which we sort of rely on to navigate the world for us, they showed that they were flawed during the pandemic. For instance, at the beginning of the pandemic, the World Health Organization said that COVID is not airborne. And if you go on Twitter and you look at their page, the tweet's still up, which says that COVID is not airborne.
But we very quickly found out that COVID was airborne. And it was actually disastrous because people obviously were lulled into a false sense of security. So that was obviously a big problem. And then we also had the problem with the masks, how efficacious are they?
Then there was a problem of vaccines or how efficacious are vaccines and what's what is the effect. And then of course, there was a lably hypothesis and that was instantly dismissed as a conspiracy theory, despite the fact that there is at least as good an argument that COVID has taken from the lab, as that it was naturally resolved in actual spillover. So these events, I think, really destroyed trust in institutions. But obviously this problem began before COVID.
It just, COVID exacerbated it a lot. And obviously things have not gotten any better since then. We've seen, for instance, the whole Harvard scandal, the plagiarism scandal. This year we've seen many big academic studies which have been shown to be completely bunk.
There was a famous, famous name that's in the case of me, but he did a series of studies about systemic racism, which he basically showed that systemic racism is a thing. And this was picked up by the New York Times, Washington Post, to basically say, hey, look, systemic racism is a real thing. Look at these disparities in treatment of white people and black people. That was all shown to be complete nonsense.
It was all fabricated. All the data was fabricated. Dan Arrealy, who's a famous psychologist, his work was also found to be fabricated. And ironically, there was a Harvard professor who was studying thinking of information who ended up, her own work was fake.
So this year has been really bad for academia. There's been a massive drop in trust. And if you look at any poll regarding trust in the media, you see a gradual slope. You see people decline.
On both sides of the aisle, but particularly amongst people on the right, because obviously this is sort of an idea that most of the mainstream institutions in the West lean left. But even the left have less trust over time in institutions. And obviously this has gotten a lot worse over the past few years. So the problem with trust is it's like a tree where it takes a long period of time of nourishment and life, seeing what's going on to actually grow it.
But it could be chopped down in like a day. It takes years for a tree to grow, but it could be chopped down in a single day. And it's institutions over many years, they tried to build trust with the public, but a few real bad instances of betrayal of that trust have now caused the trust to a nose dive. And what's interesting here is this dovetails with what we were talking about previously about cynical genius illusion, because a lack of trust leads to more cynicism.
And the cynicism stops people from doing things. People become more risk averse. They become less likely to form partnerships with people, even to form relationships with people. And so there's a lot less innovation in a sense, because people distrust a lot of things.
You see in our daily lives with the ways, again, this is, I'm not saying that this distrust is unwarranted. A lot of it is warranted. I mean, if you look at what's going on in American San Francisco, places like that, where you see, you know, the government in San Francisco had an opportunity to clean up the streets, to take the fentanyl uses of the streets, to house them in a decent place, and, you know, to try and give them help, and to clean up the streets generally. And they didn't do it.
They only did it when the premier of China, Xi Jinping came up. So they thought, okay, now we definitely got to do something about it. So they, that just showed that they just didn't care. Obviously, you know, when there's a foreign leader coming to visit, then they suddenly clean up the streets.
So this is obviously, you know, this is, this is, this trust isn't necessarily unwarranted. But what's happened is the resolve this is that people tend to, no matter how much information you give them, no matter how much information the World Health Organization or governments or corporations even try to give people, the fact is that there's this porosity of trust. And I don't, to be honest, I don't think that this trust is ever going to be fully restored. I personally don't trust institutions anymore.
I find that it's easier to trust individuals now. That's what I do. I don't really trust institutions. And the reason for this is although there are a lot of low integrity individuals, there are also a lot of extremely high integrity individuals.
And it's much easier to gauge whether an individual is high integrity than whether an institution is high integrity. In fact, most institutions tend to fall to the level of their lowest integrity members. This is because corrupt people obviously tend to rise high institutions because they tend to be more ruthless. They tend to be more dishonest.
They tend to play the game. And so they, the dishonest people rise to the top in institutions. People who are, people who are trustworthy on their own in solitude also become untrustworthy due to negligence or fear or compliance or the avoline paradox. All of those things happen.
So you get honest individuals and untrustworthy highly falsified groups, even if they're made even if the individual parts are trustworthy. It all comes down to the perverse incentive structures that institutions have. They tend to be the sort of closed systems of status games. They also tend to be chasing money.
And a lot of the time, these people are playing against each other for status. So at least the purity spirals, for instance. And a lot of these perverse incentives ensure that institutions can never really rise above their worst members. Whereas individuals, they are a lot more variable.
Not every individual is more trustworthy than every institution, but of the high integrity individuals. They're a lot more trustworthy than high integrity institutions. And so I tend to trust individuals a lot more in ways that I learn whether I can trust someone or not. I have a few heuristics, but for instance, one of them would be, are they willing to publicly admit when they get things wrong?
Because it takes integrity to admit when you're wrong, but it takes a huge amount of integrity to do it publicly. And if you can do that, that's a very rare rescue. It takes a huge amount of strength to be able to go out there and say, okay, I was wrong. And so that for me is a very good indicator that somebody's high integrity.
It shows that they value the truth more than their own ego. One of my favorite heuristics for this is when was the last time that the person you're thinking about surprised you with one of their takes? If they are predictable with the things that they do, if you know one of their views and from it, you can accurately predict everything else that they believe, they're probably not a serious thinker. They've just absorbed some ideology wholesale.
What you want is someone who you don't always necessarily agree with, but definitely you can't predict. Like, obviously, most people do fall in some sort of grouping of ideologies. That's why we tend to have people that birds of a feather. But yeah, when was the last time that this person surprised you with something that they commented about?
Yeah, that's definitely one of mine as well because it shows that somebody's willing to sort of think for themselves rather than sort of subscribe to a total package ideology, which just gives you everything, you know, it tells you what to think about abortion, it tells you what to think about gun control, it tells you what to think about freedom, speech. You know, all of these things are generally unrelated, but if somebody's got all of these predictable opinions, it shows you that they're kind of getting it all wholesale. There's something that I think is associated with this, another one of yours ambiguity aversion. People tends to find uncertain outcomes less tolerable than bad outcomes.
Daburka et al 2016 found that test participants who were told they had a small chance of receiving an electric shock exhibited much higher stress levels than those who knew they'd certainly receive an electric shock. Yeah, I mean, this explains so much. I mean, everything from sort of the world of investing explains market volatility, you know, but it also explains things at a personal level where one thing I find in my personal life is that things are never as bad as I think that they're going to be pretty much. It's a very simple thing, but I find that the sort of anxiety of expecting what we're trying to expect what's going to happen is often worse than the actual any, even the worst eventuality.
So, you know, for instance, if I were one of my old styles, you know, from say 10 years ago, I might be nervous having this conversation with you right now, knowing that a lot of people are listening, and I would probably be playing in my heads a lot of times where it could go wrong, I might say the wrong words, you know, I might say something really bad, I might say the N word or something else that you know. And then that's it. You know, and I think about the worst possible scenario, right? And that would really like, you know, give me nightmares.
But then I would find that even if the worst did happen, it probably wouldn't actually be that bad. Not that I'm actually going to say that. But like, you know, just things are always worse in your mind because your mind is more terrifying than reality. Your imagination is more terrifying than reality.
It's a more skilled sort of scaremonger than reality, you know, because it knows your worst fears. And so I think when you're uncertain, you can often imagine extremely bad outcomes because in that uncertainty, that's where your imagination runs right. That's one aspect of it with regards to the ambiguity of a version that you're talking about with the electric shocks. Again, it's managing the anxiety of uncertainty that takes a bigger toll on somebody than actually just resigning themselves to the worst outcome.
I found that this is again, you know, if I just, if I know that something is going to happen, something bad is going to happen. It gives me a sense of peace of mind because I know what to predict. I know what to expect. And so I don't need to expend stress and mental effort in trying to find a way out of it, trying to sort of predict what's going to happen.
Because trying to predict what's going to happen is a very stressful sort of thing to do. It basically requires you to consider an extremely wide swathe of possibilities. And our minds are just not very good at doing that. You know, if we have just one path ahead of us, even if that's a bad path, even if it's got a ditch at the end of it, it's much easier to just continue on that path and say, okay, so when it happens, I'll deal with it, you know, then it is to say, okay, which of these paths has gone ditch at the end of it.
You know, how many steps away is it? You know, every step you take, you have to be worried that you might fall down that ditch. So it's the stress of having to navigate possibility, which ends up causing more mental discomfort than the actual bad outcome itself. Do you think that ambiguity aversion explains some of the conspiratorial thinking, doomsday, cultish, like fads that we've seen that it actually closes down the potential optionality of the world to one thing, one bad thing, but it gives you a sense of certainty, as opposed to leaving you open to ambiguity?
Yeah, absolutely, 100%. Because I think there is one thing that's scarier than a conspiracy of people plotting everything, and that is no conspiracy of people plotting everything. That everything is just rudderless, that society's rudderless, basically. Nobody knows what they're doing.
You know, everybody is just kind of trying to navigate the world as best as they can. There is no overarching plan. That's scary also. And so it leads to uncertainty.
When you don't know what to expect, when you can't blame your problems on a single thing, that leaves, again, it leaves so many paths ahead of you that you just become overwhelmed. And you just kind of like the stress of trying to work out which path is the true one. That is an underrated form of stress, whereas the stress of knowing that there is a bad, there's a group of bad people out there who are applying everything. That actually isn't really stressful.
In fact, it's actually quite interesting because then you want to go online and you want to learn more about the future. Certainly about it. Yeah, I give up this idea called anxiety cost. So in the same way as you have opportunity cost, the amount of time that you spend thinking about a thing that you could have gotten rid of had you have just done the thing, when you wake up in a morning, you need to meditate, walk the dog, go to work the longer that it takes to meditate, the more times you have to have the thought.
I still need to meditate today. That is a very effortful thing to do. And this is like a protracted version of that. There was this from Matthew Syed in the Times, this is back in 2020.
Psychologists have conducted experiments to shed light on why people lose or at least suspend rationality. One experiment asked people to imagine going to a doctor to hear an uncertain medical diagnosis. Such people were significantly more likely to express the belief that God was in control of their lives. Another asked participants to imagine a time of deep uncertainty when they feared for their jobs or their health or their children.
They were far more likely to see a pattern in meaningless static or to infer that two random events were connected. This is such a common finding that psychologists have given it a name. A compensatory control. When we feel uncertain, when randomness intrudes upon our lives, we respond by reintroducing order in some other way.
Superstitions and conspiracy theory speak to this need. It is not easy to accept that important events are shaped by random forces. This is why, for some, it makes more sense to believe that we are threatened by the grand plans of malign scientists than the chance mutation of a silly little microbe. Yeah, absolutely.
I think it explains so much about why we dramatize reality. We tend to sort of turn events into stories because it's much more orderly. If you try to comprehend the world as it actually is, you mind what we overwhelmed. There's just so many variables going on all over the world, like that we have to reduce things down to simple patterns, which we call stories, in which we basically, we have collapsed the sort of web of causality down to a single thread.
And that makes life a lot easier to sort of comprehend. Even if it's not completely true, what we believe, but it's true enough that we can get on with our lives and just kind of not have to worry about it. So much of our brains. What you're looking for with any kind of sense-making, truth-making system is I want to be able to move through the world with reliable, predictive accuracy of what's going to happen.
But really what's deeper than that is I just don't want to expend that much mental effort trying to work out what's going to happen. And the difference between those two allows this to slip in, which is what monofinking is, right? If every single problem in the world is because of capitalism or the climate change or the libtards or the whatever, if every single problem is due to the same solution, that's because the demand for answers outstrips your ability to supply them. So you just retrofit one answer to all questions.
Yeah, absolutely. Again, it's a cognitive sort of energy-saving mechanism that people engage in. And I think, yeah, it explains so much of the current landscape, the current sort of online landscape, particularly. It explains tribalism.
There's much easier just to, for instance, I saw this really good tweet by Michael Malice. I think he's been on this show many times, unfortunately. Yeah. And he said, I'm going to put him in front of me, but he wrote something like in terms of, he said, people don't see the world including, sorry, most people don't navigate the world by a true and false filter, but by an us and them filter.
And so it's like this true and false is too much of a cognitive demand. You know, trying to work out what's true and false. It's just way too much effort for most people. And it requires statistical analysis.
It requires looking at hard data. It requires sort of suppressing your own emotions. There's so much that you need to do in order to actually work out what's true. Whereas if you just adopt a very simple, a sub-system heuristic, it's so much easier.
And you can still get on in your life because if you have an us versus them, so strategy, then you're going to be in the same boat with a group of other people who will help you, you know, sort of navigate the world and they'll become your allies. So it's just so less cognitively demanding to do that. And pretty much everything about our sort of mental architecture is configured to this sort of system because that's how we evolved. You know, when we went together, we lived in tribes and we sort of engaged in tribal warfare.
So everything that we've just been talking about, this pattern matching and everything, is all in the service of tribalism, ultimately. So we will see the best in what our allies say and we will see the worst in what our enemies say. We'll interpret it in the worst possible way. We will see signs in the clouds that sort of put end that God is on our side or whatever.
He's on our side and he hates the enemies. Whatever it is, we'll find patterns that justify us versus them sort of attitude, naturally. That's what comes naturally to us. And it also explains why we see things in terms of drama rather than data.
I think this was one of my own sort of concepts. I was talking about compassion, faith. This idea that sort of there were experiments that were conducted in which people basically engaged in sort of these appeals for charity. So what they did is like a sort of a campaign for funding for charity and they had two different ways of doing it.
One way was based on presenting famine statistics and hard data. And the other was based on presenting the story of a single starting girl. And the people tended to donate a lot more to the girl. And the reason for this is that the hard data is alien to the human brain.
And statistics is just something that we're not, our brains are not formatted for that kind of data analysis, which is too much effort. It requires too many calories and too much time. So what our brains do is we collapse the web of course. We collapse all the variables into a single thread, a single line, single linear sort of vector, which just has a beginning and middle and end.
So the girl is starving. She needs to help. You give her your help. She is no longer starving.
And therefore you've saved. And then that's it. And then you're a good person. So that's how we sort of collapse the whole world down to these single narrative threads.
And it just makes, because obviously we think in the language of story, if you want to convince people, that's how you've got to appeal to people. You've got to, statistics aren't going to help. You can write a lot of all the numbers you want. The bigger they are, the more alien they are.
And the less they'll be really comprehended. You get the story of a single girl and you present her story in a narrative sequence in the way that people tell stories. You know, you could use the three-act structure. You could use the hero's journey.
Whatever system you want, but as long as it's a narrative thread, a single narrative thread, you'll reach a lot more people. So we're not donating a million times more money or feeling a million times worse when we hear the story of a million kids compared with the one of the single kid. In fact, it's probably the opposite that that holds on our heartstrings. Yeah, the personification of data and stories.
You can see the charity examples perfectly right. They are split testing into oblivion. What the most effective way to pull on people's heartstrings is. Like they know.
So if you want to find out how to motivate people's behavior, just watch a charity advert. Because they're not doing the thing that doesn't motivate behavior. They're doing precisely the thing that motivates behavior. And they'll have behavioral scientists, behavioral economics guys.
They'll have had Rory Sutherland will be in there and the copyright is not the rest of it. Split testing everything. That's what they've arrived at. Right.
Next one preference falsification. If people are afraid to say what they really think, they will instead lie. Therefore punishing speech, whether by taking offense or by threatening censorship, is ultimately a request to be deceived. Yeah.
I mean, so this, I think is another reason why there's actually a distrust in institutions because they've tended to react to criticism by, essentially, censoring people. But it's, censorship is based on a very outdated way of operating. It's based on a very outdated information architecture. So censorship would have worked very well.
A hundred years ago, when there was a centralized authority which passed information down to everybody. Whether it was via printed leaflets or television screens. You know, information was very central. It was very centralized.
But that system no longer works because the reason it worked in the past was because since the authorities provided a single system of information. So for instance, think about the TV, right? The TV, in the UK, the TV tended to only have four channels originally when I was young, very young. And those four channels all tended to have the same sort of narrative.
So if you wanted to censor certain information, you could just basically, you could pass a law because this would broadcast media. So they were beholden to government intervention. So you could pass a law saying that, you know, the four channels are not allowed to talk about this. So therefore now none of that information is going to get beaten to people's homes.
So now nobody can ever know what that information was. But that kind of sort of centralized information structure no longer exists. All information in the West at least is decentralized or it's decentralized or it's decentralizedable. In the sense that somebody can pick up on anything now and make it go viral.
So now censorship doesn't work. Now what happens is people are well aware of what's being censored. And you have this thing, obviously the Streisand effect where when people learn what's being censored, then they want to know what that thing is even more. In the past, like the further back into the past we go, the less likely this Streisand effect was because people wouldn't even know what was being censored since information was centralized.
But now because information is everywhere, that information is going to leak out. People don't know what's being censored. People don't know. Even if they don't know the precise thing that's being censored, they're going to know what kind of information is being censored from them because somebody's going to spill the beans somewhere because of how interconnected everything is.
You know, all it takes is just one person to spill the beans and then that's going to go viral. Everybody's going to find out about it. And we see this repeatedly, you know, for instance, with a lovely, lovely, going battle, lovely hypothesis. Immediately, as soon as Facebook and Twitter and everybody else tried to stifle that story, it went viral when everybody was talking about it because it isn't possible.
Yeah, that's another perfect example. There's many other examples. As soon as one organization tries to censor something, other individuals will immediately raise the alarm. And as soon as that happens, everybody now wants to know what that thing was censored.
They want to know why it was withheld from them. This is this thing called reactance, sometimes called the backfire effect, where when you would hold, when you say people can't have something, they become even more adamant that they want it. They want it. They want it even more.
You know, and so this leads to essentially a backfire. That's what it was called. And what happens is that people then decide that, hang on a second, if this is being withheld from me, then it's going to, obviously, I mean, I'm going a little bit, I'm very muff a little bit from the original thing. So that's one aspect of it.
But like, yeah, another aspect of this whole censorship thing is that when people realize that they can't say certain things, they instead will lie and they will, they're not going to change their beliefs. Like I said, the backfire effect means that people don't become, if you censor people, they're not going to become less likely to believe that thing. They're going to become more likely to believe that thing. And the only thing that's going to change is that if they know that they're going to get banned for say something, they'll just lie.
But they're not going to change their thoughts. In fact, the opposite is happening. And so it's a counterproductive thing to do in the digital age. That's why censorship just doesn't work in the digital age.
Because although people control what people say online, you can't control what they think. In fact, what you do is you make people more adamant to think what they want to think. So that's a bit more entrenched in their beliefs. So I'm going to talk to a couple of episodes ago about the chilling effect.
When punishment for what people say becomes widespread, people stop saying what they really think and instead say whatever is needed to thrive in the social environment, thus limits on speech, become limits on sincerity. It seems very similar to preference falsification. Is there a difference between the two? Where is the difference?
Yeah, so I mean, they are essentially the same thing. I mean, maybe the difference would be something of scale where preference falsification really refers more to the individual actions. And then I think like the spirant of silence, which is another way of saying the same thing, spirant of silence is the cumulative effect of preference falsification. So what happens is that certain ideas become more and more of a voting over time.
And when they become the voting, people don't want to be the first person. It's just a fancy way of saying forbidden. Okay, that's cool. Verboton.
Yeah, for some reason, I don't know why I said verboton. I like it's not a verdict. Yeah. But yeah, what happens is that it leads to a spirant of silence.
So the more that an idea becomes unsayable, the less likely people are to say it. And so the more it becomes insane. It's kind of like a cycle. Yeah.
It's not forcing system. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah.
I mean, I just don't know what people are thinking about these organizations when they think that they can censor information in the digital age. It just very, very rarely works. It might work in a place like China, but even in China, where the government has absolute control, you know, they've got the sort of the great firewall, what they call the great firewall. But even that is not enough now.
They've been cases now where information is gone viral that the CCP didn't want to go viral because they were trying to stifle it. And in the age of, you know, even though they do all they can, it just isn't possible because of the number, because of how fast information travels in the digital age and because of the number of connections between nodes. It's just not possible to use censorship anymore. So any organization that's trying to use censorship, they're using 20th century tactics against 21st century information systems.
It just doesn't work. And again, it leads to more distrust of institutions. So this goes back to this whole thing that we're talking about with, you know, the problem of trust in society and it leads to more cynicism. So between the backfire effect and the cynical, the whole cynical thing, you know, it just makes things worse.
And I don't know when institutions are going to learn this, but eventually they will hopefully. You end up with this kind of game where they chase their own tail in a little bit. So for instance, you see this with YouTube channels. So YouTube channel will begin to struggle with plays and they won't be too sure why.
And everybody has on YouTube when it comes to the way that they frame their episode and what they do, both content and framing. They have an overton window that they exist within and they're not prepared usually to go beyond a particular level of boring because people aren't going to click. And there's usually an upper bound of clickbaitness that they're also not prepared to go past because that seems kind of hacky. And what will happen is they will begin to skew more and more toward the clickbait side.
They will use more limbic hijack words, war, battle, like, like imagery, the whole misabeasification faces. They'll lean more down that. But the problem that you have as you begin to pull that lever more and more to chase ever declining plays, your audience becomes increasingly desensitized to the subtlety that you want them to come back to. So it's a one way street.
My point being that you chase that sort of limbic hijack game and it makes people become increasingly desensitized to the things that you can say in the same way as institutions that feel like they're losing control increasingly apply more rigorous high levels of scrutiny, high levels of control. And what happens? It drives the trust down ever more. You can't dictate trust top down.
It has to be emergent. It has to come out bottom up. But they're chasing it more and more and more. And my goal would be we need to do more because the trust is declining.
And that means that we need to use more ever more totalitarian techniques to do this. And it doesn't work. And the fact that they think that it's going to work actually makes it even harder to trust them because they're just so wrong about that. So you ask yourself what else are they wrong about?
They've got to be wrong about so many things. They don't understand this basic facet of human psychology. Then they're pretty much a hard trust on anything else. Yeah.
Hero-stratic fame. Many people would rather be hated than unknown. In ancient Greece, herestratus burned down the Temple of Artemis purely so he'd be remembered. Now we have nuisance influences who stream themselves committing crimes and harassing people purely for clout.
Yeah. So this has become a serious problem now, I think. So I don't know if you know who Jack Doherty is. I do.
This sort of world of IRL streamers and Jack Doherty tell them when I get this wrong. There are a few of them. He appears to kind of start fights in person and has massive bounces slash security guys with him, most of whom seem to be black. And then they will sort out whatever the issue is by punching or choking out the person that Jack just started some beef with.
And then the internet goes completely crazy by saying this dude started on somebody then got his six foot seven behemoth of a security guy to step in and smash some kid in the face. And now he's getting paid millions of dollars and has a Lambo and lives in LA or something. Exactly. Yeah.
And he's not the only one. I mean, this is a whole trend. You know, there's people like Mizzie for instance, you probably know about Mizzie as well, who was the guy who was going into libraries and ripping up the books, whilst filming the librarians to see what they would do. And then you have like Johnny Somali who would go out and start harassing people in streets and recording their reactions.
And he actually went to Japan and it's quite interesting because he first got knocked out. He got hit in the face and knocked out because in Japan, they don't screw around. Right. And then he got arrested and now he's in jail.
At least he passed the head into jail. He's in jail in Japan. Right. So, so there is occasionally there is comeuppence.
But I mean, most of the time there is no comeuppence for these influences and they just go out there and they harass people in the streets and they record it because they know again, this is limbecide jacking. Right. They know that they're just by appealing to the worst, most basic simple system of the human brain. They can get a lot of eyeballs.
And so they just basically, they would look, there's a lot of pressure on young people to be to have a lot of followers on social media, for instance, you know, and they want to be popular. Everybody wants to be the cool kids. And one way to get a large one of them online, if you don't have other talents, is to just be an asshole, you know, just be an asshole and fill in people around you. And the people get hateful followers.
They'll get hate audiences who watch them simply to hate on them. And I think, you know, people like Mizzi and Jack Daugherty have fallen to this kind of strategy. I think Jack Daugherty, originally, he was just some, he just did some other lifestyle stuff. But he obviously found this niche and he thought, wow, I'm making way more when he's doing this.
And now he's a millionaire. I mean, he's got a lot of money. And, you know, he's got a very glamorous lifestyle. At least it appears glamorous if you look at his Instagram account, you know, he's surrounded by fancy cars and beautiful women and all this stuff, you know, and he portrays this kind of lifestyle of, you know, I'm success.
But really, when you look at what he does to earn that success now, he just goes out there and he just makes life miserable for everybody. And this is bad because this is creating, again, it's creating a very perverse incentive structure fueled by TikTok again. And the Chinese government probably knows that they're doing this and they're allowing that these nuisance influencers to get a lot of views on TikTok because they know that it's bad for America and it's bad for the UK and it's bad for West in general. But yeah, I mean, so it's a race to the bottom now where you've got a lot of people competing to be the most nuisance, the biggest nuisance to be the worst possible human being, people who formerly were pranksters, people like FusiTube.
So you'd probably know about FusiTube. Basically had a long psychological break on camera, got arrested by Miami police, called the cops on himself, pretended that he was someone had a knife or a gun or something. Yeah, wild. Exactly.
And the crazy thing is that we don't even know if this was genuine or not. This could have all been part of, again, just being a nuisance. It might be real, it might not. We don't know because the line between real and sort of fiction is sort of blaring now.
And for instance, Mizzi said that all of his pranks were planned and stuff, but it's hard to believe that he would go into say Azda, go to a superstore and he would start riding on the disabled trolley things that they have and just smashing shelves and stuff and that the supermarkets would actually allow him to do that. It's just not, I don't believe that. But like a lot of them will say stuff like that to defend themselves if they get into a lot of hot water. And ultimately, what this does is that this creates really bad incentives for kids because if you think about in the past, in order to be, you know, at the dawn of YouTube, for instance, in order to get a big following on YouTube, you tended to have to do something that was extraordinary in some way, an extraordinary in a positive sense.
You tend to, you know, have to be talented at something. The first big YouTube is tended to be sort of musicians or sort of, you know, athletes of some kind of people who had some kind of skill. But very soon people realized that you could actually develop just as big of a following by having zero talent and just being a nuisance, just being an assault people. And once that happened, this kind of nuisance influencing went viral and it's essentially a race to the bottom now where people are competing now to be the worst possible human being, which really sets a bad precedent.
It sets bad incentives for young kids watching this because when the kids watch it, they say, oh, you know, I want to be like, missing, I want to be like Jackie T, I want to have all these fancy girls, all these fancy cars, you know, I want to be like that. So I'm going to learn how to be an insufferable human being. That person is bringing no value to life and they're getting rewarded for it. They respond to incentives.
Yeah, they respond to incentives. And if you say, rather than working really hard at a thing consistently for a long period of time and accumulating skills and making yourself worthwhile, the bottom of the brain. It's the reason I think in part that there is some distaste against Silver Spoon dynasty children and only fans influences that there's something unfair. It feels like, well, you got that, but you didn't work for it.
And in America to Cratic System, which is what we've got, that's always going to get people's back. So I have to work harder than this person to get less. How can that be fair? Oh, well, it's because they were given a privilege that I didn't get.
That seems unfair. It's because they're prepared to compromise their morals in some way that I see as I wouldn't do that. I am somehow superior to them. There's this like Puritan sort of nobility that gets associated with it.
But when we're talking about new sin influences, which I think is a phenomenal term I've never heard of before, and do that first sentence that you put, many people would rather be hated than unknown. Just brilliant. And I know that you've got two books in the works, one of which you may have submitted, but I can't wait for both of them. I think all of the time, I watch very similar stuff to what you watch, and yet what you're able to pull out of it is significantly more in depth than me.
So I'm very, very excited for what you've got coming up. Thank you. Yeah. So I got one, here's one that I made earlier.
So, toxic compassion. In a world where our opinions have been separated from our deeds, appearing to do good has become more important than actually doing good. The prioritization of short-term emotional comfort over actual long-term flourishing motivates people to save the things, which make them appear caring and empathetic, even if they result in negative outcomes over time. So, I've seen most obviously in support for the body positivity movement, rather than make someone feel uncomfortable about their weight, you would say that weight has no bearing on health, even if that encourages people or discourages them from losing weight, which results in worse outcomes over the long term.
Same thing could have been seen for defund the police, that rather than talk about some of the challenges that are faced by different groups, when it comes to policing, you say that all police are mistreating minorities, therefore the police should be withdrawn, even if the actual outcome over the long term is more poor policing and more negative outcomes for those precise minorities that you're looking to protect in the first place. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so this brings together quite a few very, very interesting and informative ideas, one of which it would be Luxury Beliefs, which I think you alluded to at the end there. And also my idea of the opinion pageant, where the whole thing about the social media has caused us to sort of overvalue opinions as a gauge of character, which is judged more by what we say them by what we do.
And so this goes to what you were saying initially about how it's all about looking good, rather than doing good, which again echoes what Elon Musk said, I think in a talk with the New York Times a couple of weeks ago, where he's just saying that he's not going to be a good person. And so I think in a few weeks ago, where he just expressed a bit of outrage at how corporations are trying to look good, but not actually doing good. And yeah, I think this is one of the key concepts to understand the digital age, where because we now have an image oriented sort of economy, where everything, your success in life is based on how you appear to others now, more than ever, because social media is where people come to promote that stuff, whether you're a corporation, whether you're a politician, whether you're an influencer, everybody's on social media trying to promote themselves, trying to show why their brand is the brand that you should buy into. And part of this is this whole social game, this new social game.
I mean, obviously, there's always been a social game, as long as there's been a society, but it's been sort of pushed to the forefront by the fact that the vast majority of our lives now are spent trying to appear a certain way to people in terms of, you know, just on social media. It really explains so much of everything from sort of cancellation to the kinds of politics that we have now, polarization and even disinformation. And all of these things really ultimately come down to people trying to look as good as they can, rather than trying to do as good as they can. So people are peddling theories that again, the peddling theories that they've been a hijack people's brains and, you know, scare among of them, or they're trying to convince people that they're morally superior.
So they will, you know, they'll sort of post their luxury beliefs online. And I think that it's hard to really work out how we go from here, where everything is image oriented and things are becoming more so. But ultimately, I think there may be some kind of, I mean, we're kind of seeing it already where we've seen it with, there's kind of backlash to people just going against looking good, trying to people counter signaling. There's been a rise of counter signaling.
I think that Trump's election in 2016 was a fall of counter signaling, where people elected the most obnoxious, outwardly, you know, like kind of somebody who just made no effort to even appear good, or at least they did it in a really, really obnoxious and sort of overbearing cartoonish way, almost as a parody of this society that we're living it. I think that was a kind of counter signaling, but I think that, yeah, there's also, there's been the rise of vice signaling as a response to this sort of prevalence of virtue signaling. But even like, vice signaling is where people will outwardly just say things that they know are going to upset people. You could even say that this new sin influencing is a kind of vice signaling, where people are like, I don't care.
I'm over and above the morality game. I don't have to appear good. I can just be the worst person possible. People are Andru Tate, for instance, who have developed massive followings by saying the opposite of what is considered good by the majority of society.
You see, Elon Musk is counter signaling very, very strongly on Twitter a lot of the time, where he will say things that are the complete opposite of what we've been taught, we should say by the New York Times, by the Washington Post, by the World Health Organization, all these other mainstream organizations. They tell us that we should be saying these kinds of beliefs. We should be portraying this kind of person. We should be, you know, this is how we should be to be a good person.
And then you've got these rogues like Elon, like Donald Trump, like Andru Tate, who are basically saying, no, screw that. Let's do the opposite of what they say. So that's a kind of backlash. But in a strange sense, this vice signaling is itself a kind of virtue signaling, because it is signaling to others that you are way above all of this.
Silly sort of, you know, bickering that people are engaging in. It's the same reason why Yeezys have got progressively more ugly over time. And if you actually look at what counts for a lot of super fashionable streetwear at the moment, it's almost like Hobo Chic. Well, that's because you're saying, look, I have so much surplus cool in me that I can basically dress what is so orthogonal to what other people think is cool and still be cool.
That's how cool I am, which oddly, because of how cool is kind of, it's just so subjective. If you call something cool and if enough people agree, it kind of is, and no one can falsify whether it is or not. But yeah, this toxic compassion thing I've been playing around with for ages. And it's the interesting bit is that second part, the prioritization of short term emotional comfort over long term flourishing, saying things, you know, like you're totally correct.
Living life online has caused us to flatten down how we are judged to be about proclamations rather than actions. And it's the reason that people were bullied about whether they did or didn't post a black square. It's about whether you do or don't have Ukraine in your bio. It's about whether you do or don't have pronouns in your email signature, all of those things.
And yeah, that addition. Again, yeah, it's perverse incentives. I think that's probably the running theme of today's discussion is we're creating all these perverse incentives for people to follow. And that's essentially what's driving these behaviors is that we're rewarding.
We're rewarding, like you said, rewarding the short term gains over the long term, the actual proper gains, which are the long term gains. We're sort of trapping ourselves in these compulsion loops. So compulsion loops are this idea from gaming and gamification, where you trap people in these short term cycles of effort and reward that can often lead them away from what they should really be doing. And we're all getting trapped in these compulsion loops, whether it's being a nuisance, being an asshole online, or whether it's being virtually single or annoying.
We're kind of all chasing these short term rewards at the expense. Well, not all of us, but I mean, many of us are. I like to think that you and I are a little bit better. We're not completely into it.
I mean, think about how many times anyone that's ever been on a plane knowing that they don't have connection gets their phone out, swipes up, cycles through a bunch of apps, even knowing that nothing can have happened. It's a compulsion. It's ingrained in there. So, I think everybody is not a single person, but it's a collection of selves.
And some of these selves are much more representative of who we are at our core than others. And I think emotion can bring out a sign of us that is not really us. And it can cause us to act in ways that we would later regret. And I found this myself, like I don't really do it anymore, but back in the early days, like 10 years ago, I would get sometimes I get angry online, if somebody said something nasty to me.
And I would be spiteful when I'd say something nasty back. And I would later read back what I'd written. And I would be like, wow, I can't believe I actually said that. I was in a, I basically was just as bad as them.
Like, I should be better. And I just realized that that person that is saying those things was not actually me because if I'm later regretting when I'm calm, I'm later regretting when I was angry. Then I'm not, it's not really me. One of the things I say is that when you act when you're emotional, you are an ambassador for your most primitive self.
You're basically acting for your most animal self because you're engaging your reptilian brain. And any decision that I've made when I've been emotional has pretty much turned out to be a bad decision. I mean, at least it's been some optimal. I always make better decisions when I'm mentally sort of balanced.
And I think that's true of pretty much anybody. But if you send that email and it's a moment more often than not, you're going to think, I could have waited that better. I could have waited that lot better. So what I do now is it's not like on a robot, I do feel emotions.
You know, if somebody says something nasty to me online, I get an urge to just be nasty back. You know, I get it like we all do. We're all humans. I never, you know, I never like just I'm never spiteful.
If I reply somebody and sometimes I'm snarky, I am snarky, but I tend to do it in a way that I think is more productive. But what I always do is I find feelings particularly emotional always wait for that emotion to pass because it will pass. And it's amazing how often when you let that emotion pass and then you consider what you would have done when you were emotional. You realize how idiotic it would have been.
You know, that's happened to me so many times that it's I actually am afraid of acting when I'm emotional because I just realize how demented I am emotional. And I think this is true of everybody. Yeah, it is deranging. Emotions ultimately are the opposite of rationality.
They are a shortcut. There's this thing called the effecturistic, which is this idea that emotions evolve. I mean, I would say emotions evolve for two purposes. One of them is they evolve for motivation.
And the other is that they evolved for decision making and low information environments. You know, your gut feeling, for instance, your gut feeling is how you make decisions when you don't have enough information. And the thing with gut feeling is it's actually often wrong. People will say, oh, I swear by, you know, I've got a really good gut feeling.
I'm always, you know, I always trust my gut. But what they're doing is they're engaging in confirmation bias. They'll usually remember when they've got feelings right, but they won't remember when they've got feelings wrong. And so they're obviously going to naturally be skewed towards believing that they've got feelings more accurate than it actually is.
And that's why I don't really trust it so much. I mean, there's something called intuition, which is a little bit more than gut feeling, which is more something that you've learned to trust over time. It's something that you certain cues that you just see and then from that you can build before picture. But just relying on emotional load is usually not a good strategy for decision making because again, emotion favors short term impulses.
It favors short term compulsion loops over long term compulsion loops. And so this is why I think you should always, if you're going to make an important decision, just wait for the emotion to pass. It will pass. Most emotions don't last very long.
Most emotions last few minutes, you know, and then they're usually weak and they fade. And that's all you've got to do is just wait a couple of minutes and then see, compare your actions when you're not emotional to how you were going to act when you were emotional. And you realize there's a massive difference. And that way you'll prevent yourself from many regrets, I think.
Semantic stop sign. One way people end discussions is by disguising descriptions as explanations. For instance, the word evil is used to explain behavior, but really only describes it. It resolves the question by not creating understanding, but by killing curiosity.
Yeah. So we see this, see this online a lot again with people calling other people names in order to sort of dismiss anything that they've said. So an example of this might be calling somebody a bigger, you know, saying, oh, you're a bigger and stuff. And basically saying, oh, why did he feel this?
Why does he think that? Oh, because he's a bigger. And for many people, that's enough. Oh, okay, he's a bigger.
So I don't need to listen to what he has to say anymore. But really, what is what is bigotry? Biggatory is not an explanation for behavior. It's a description of behavior.
Right. It's a description. Basically, it's a statement that somebody is prejudiced towards somebody. Right.
So that's it's not really, I mean, you could use it as a very shallow explanation, but it doesn't really explain much. If you really want to know, if you really want the explanation, then you've got to delve a little bit deeper. You've got to go a bit further back and you've got to say, okay, so this person's a bigger. So that's a description.
So now we need an explanation for why is that person a bigger? Why would they say that thing? And then you would say, okay, it could be many things. Like, for instance, let's use an example of classical bigotry.
So somebody might, for instance, hate immigrants. They might say, oh, I hate immigrants. I just don't want these boats to keep coming to Ashu or whatever. And the standard response from many people in positions of power is to say, oh, that's just bigoted.
Move on. Next question. But if you really want to understand, you've got to ask yourself, why is this person bigoted? And it may be a pretty enlightening answer.
It might be that they had their jobs taken away. They might have their job taken away by immigrants. And now they're out of work. And they're on the doll or whatever.
They're on welfare or whatever. And their life is, all their plans have been destroyed by this fact that they've just been superseded by somebody from another country. Or it might be that their family member was a victim of a crime by an immigrant. So if you can actually go past the instinct to dismiss somebody by disguising a description as an explanation, then you can actually get to the real explanation.
And then you can start to actually resolve the question. You can actually say, OK, well, so if this is the case, then I can go out there and convince this person that, hang on a second, immigration might have taken your job, but some immigrants also create jobs or whatever. I mean, I'm not going to go into the hole where the immigration is going to not all bad or not. But this is an example of what somebody could do.
So you could maybe, if you were interested in getting people to accept immigrants, if you were one of these people, you could basically do. And you could actually, instead of dismissing them and making them even more, and hate immigrants even more, which is going to happen. If you dismiss somebody's concerns, they're only going to react again. What we were talking about earlier, reactants backfire effect.
If you tell people that they're a pin is a bigoted, it's not going to stop them from being bigoted. It's going to make them more bigoted. And they're going to start thinking, oh, there's a conspiracy now to stop. There's a conspiracy by the Jews to flood the West with immigrants and all this.
And these people are calling me a bigger because they're trying to destroy my life because they don't want the truth to come up. So it's going to create, it's going to basically just have a negative effect for everybody. It's just going to make things worse for everybody. And that's why these semantic stop signs are bad because they don't resolve the question.
They don't really solve anything. They just make the problem worse. And that's why I don't call people racist. I don't call people bigoted.
I don't call people transphobic. What I do is I might call something that they've said bigoted. If I were going to use the word bigoted, I don't like the word bigoted. I feel it's overused.
I don't like the racist word racist. I feel it's overused. I don't think that these words really mean anything anymore. But if I were going to use those words, I wouldn't call people racist.
I wouldn't call people bigoted. I would call their actions bigoted. I would call their actions racist because I think that's much more helpful. Because if you call somebody bigoted or call them racist or call them transphobic or sexist or misogynistic or fascist or any of these other words that are thrown around so casually these days.
If you use those terms to describe a person, you're essentially implying that that person is irredeemable, that they are, you know, you can't help that person because they're in loss cause because they're just a bigot, you know. Whereas if you call their actions, if you call their actions racist or transphobic, and I'm not advocating this, but I'm just saying it's better than calling them a bigot, because if you call their actions because that actually allows you to still see them as a human. Because I feel that calling somebody a racist is actually dehumanizing in the sense, you know, you kind of, because especially when you consider that terms like fascist, Nazi, a lot of these terms are used to sort of paint people as the worst possible human beings. Cause when you think of the term fascist, when you think of the term Nazi, racist, when you think of these terms, you think of the worst human beings, you think of the Nazis, you know, the Nazis of Germany in the 1930s, you think of the Ku Klux Klan, you think of really bad humans, you think of people who lynched black people, you think of the worst human beings.
And so it's dehumanizing in the sense because you're portraying people as villains. You're saying this person's a villain, you know, so I can just discount everything that they say. Whereas when you call their actions, they get to whatever, then you can say, okay, well, we can actually convince this person to behave differently. So I think the semantic stops signs are a sort of very harmful aspect of our society.
And you know, that's just one example that I just gave you. We have many other examples in which these kinds of questions that people have are just sort of dismissed by disguising explanations as descriptions. Sorry, disguising descriptions as a explanation. Yes.
Max content raiser. So this is from mutual friend George Mack. Would you consume your own content? If not, don't post it.
And it's just the easiest way to work out whether or not what you're producing is actually something that you should continue producing. And I had a similar idea, a tangential idea, post-content clarity. If we presume that your body is made up of what you put in your mouth, your mind is made up of what you put in your eyes and ears, your content diet should be spiraling off your soul, not fast food for your amygdala. Yeah, 100%.
I agree. I'm very selective now about the kind of content that I consume. I used to be very careless. I used to just mindlessly browse my Twitter feed and just whatever got my attention.
No, I would follow it. But the thing is, I found that that just leads to a lot of wasted time and very low information. There's a lot of social media is not very information tense. Your feed is probably a lot better than mine because you only follow like about 100 people, whereas I follow like 600.